Pentium IV – Oops!

As reported by Darek at http://www.emulators.com; used with permission:

“In what can only be considered a monumental lapse in judgment, Intel went ahead and threw out the many tried and tested ideas implemented in both the PowerPC and AMD Athlon processor families and literally took a step back 5 years to the days of the 486… It seems that Intel is taking the approach similar to that of their upcoming Itanium chip - that the chip should do less optimization work and that the programmer should be responsible for that work. An idea not unfamiliar to RISC chip programmers, but Intel really went a little too far. They literally stripped the processor bare and tried to use brute force clock speed to make up for it!”

This expert on emulators ran several tests to compare the new chip to some older ones and here are his conclusions:

"Except the idea doesn't work. Benchmark after benchmark after benchmark shows the 1.5 GHz Pentium chip running slower than a 900 MHz Athlon, and in some cases slower than a 533 MHz Celeron, even as slow as a 200 MHz Pentium in rare cases." "The 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 wins of course, but barely over the 900 MHz AMD Athlon at about 1/3 the price and 60% of the clock speed. Worse, the Pentium 4 fails to even cut the processing time in half compared to the much slower clocked Pentium III and Celeron systems. The Pentium 4 is barely twice as fast at this benchmark as a 500 MHz Pentium III."

Pentium IV formally known as Northwood

Intel wore so much egg on their corporate face, they really had to make the new Pentium IV rock. And they did. It is a solid neck and neck race with AMD, at least on features, if not price. The worst thing (beyond current price) that can be said about the new Pentium IV (no a) is it needs a power connector called an ATX12V. Don't have one? No big deal. An adapter that fits a spare drive connector is <$10 USD.